Mackenzie's+Introduction+Letter

Dear Reader, I entered this course ready to add more activities, Do Now’s, and testing techniques to my arsenal. Being a first-year teacher with little experience, I wanted my graduate school classes to give me practical ideas that I could turn around and implement the next day in my classroom. I realize now that I wanted this not because I wanted to be a more effective teacher, but because I wanted the chaos to lessen and the pounding headaches to quit. I desired, above all, more //time//. I thought that, if my graduate courses were like lesson-planning sessions with guidance from a professor, I would finally get more time.

What I learned from this course, however, was much more beneficial than a credited lesson-planning session. I learned that time won’t ever stop for you, and that managing time more effectively doesn’t always lessen the stress. The key to being an effective—and mentally sane—teacher, is to pause for a few moments each day to //reflect//. Activities such as the Point of Tension story, the Linguistic Dimensions Study and the meditations forced me to slow down and acknowledge that teaching isn’t composed simply of constructing activities, drafting lesson plans and being prepared with materials. Teaching is about relating to people, recognizing the circumstances they come from, and acknowledging your own circumstances. Answering the third essential question, “How are social identity, power, and academic literacy related?” was particularly moving and motivating to me, because it made me examine the experiences I’ve had that have led to my relative state of power alongside the circumstances that acted upon my students, rendering many of them powerless. These are differences I’ve noticed but have not actively engaged with until this course, and I am grateful that I finally took the time to dwell on them. These factors must, and will, affect how I interact with my students. One of my goals is to teach my students how to advocate for themselves, and I believe that achieving that goal requires a strong relationship between the teacher and the students. Though educating my students is my first priority and should be, I also want them to feel like they are being treated with empathy in my classroom. My experiences so far as a teacher have taught me that once students know you care, they become more invested in your class. In addition, my experiences in this course taught me that one must examine one’s own background in order to relate to students.

While the personal reflection part of the course was valuable to me, learning about the relationship between language and prejudice was also affecting. The Subjective Language Scale activity, where we examined who we would hire based on their writing skills, forced me to contemplate language as a performance. I couldn’t help but continue considering this as we read articles about the “N” word, discussed the best way to teach grammar, and, perhaps most importantly, talked about code-switching and Standard English. This class inspired me to have conversations with my students about code-switching, and to pay close attention to the language I use when addressing grammar in the classroom. While planning my grammar lessons during the Linguistic Dimensions Study, I found it difficult to avoid language such as “right” or “wrong” when addressing grammar mistakes in Standard English. In the future, I hope to open a dialogue about code-switching early in the school year so that I avoid unintentionally emphasizing Standard English as the “correct” language.

This portfolio traces my progress in this course, from learning how humans learn language to understanding the relationship between class, language, and power. Though this course was not the quick fix, time-saving lesson-plan generator I had initially hoped for, I believe it taught me much more than that by giving me the tools I need to effectively relate to my students. I hope you enjoy exploring my work as much as I liked producing it.

Sincerely, Mackenzie